Test-Driven Development at UoM

Today when I took a glance at ELT2 door’s, I was shocked. Our usual lecturer was being replaced by an American guy. He had an Apple computer. Honestly I was about to not enter the lecture theater and phone a friend to confirm that the class has been postponed. 😀

Another interesting article on the subject matter can be found here: http://www.onlined.org/papers/000145.pdf. According to the article, test driven development is proposed in the classroom. An automated grading strategy is used to assess student-written code and student-written tests together, providing clear and immediate feedback to students about the effectiveness and validity of their testing. This is achieved by webCAT – the Web-based Center for Automated Testing.Web-CAT is a plug-in-based web application that supports electronic submission and automated grading of programming assignments. The Web-CAT Grader supports traditional models of automated program grading, but also supports grading of assignments where students do their own testing. It helps encourage test-driven development (also called test-first coding), where students write small unit tests for each piece of code they add. Web-CAT allows a student to submit his or her test cases along with the solution, and grades on test validity and test completeness as well as code correctness. More info on webCAT here: http://web-cat.cs.vt.edu/WCWiki/WhatIsWebCat

The professor then continued with another presentation on webCAT, its functionalities. The Web-CAT Grader uses a web interface for student submissions and for reporting. The feedback provided to students was inspired by JUnit’s GUI TestRunner.

Then professor proceeded with JUnit and Java Doc. The presentation was hyper interesting.

Some questions followed by the software engineering community on 1: JUnit plugin on Eclipse and 2) the coverage of the our written code by webCAT

Prof. answered accordingly.

My favourite quote is: “Happiness in Programming!”

webCAT is a new feature at UoM. The lecturers at the CSE dept. are still experimenting with it. Our software engineering lecturer intends to give an assignment using the new system. No hardcopy to be submitted. Everything online and results also obtained instantly. The pending work is the creation of student accounts with their respective IDs.

Well let’s hope that this innovative feature at UoM brings us a unique experience as future software developers. Thanks CSE dept. for this great initiative and giving Computer Science students such a unique opportunity.